Why have Bruins struggled in first rounds of playoffs?

In the last three years, the Bruins have gone seven games in each of their first-round series.

By Dan CagenDaily News staff

WILMINGTON — Former Bruins defenseman Andrew Ference had a theory on why the team always seemed to struggle in the opening round of the playoffs.

Ference believed the transition from regular-season monotony to postseason intensity took time to get adjusted to, and the Bruins weren’t ready to gear up for that when the puck dropped on playoff hockey.

In the last three years, the Bruins have gone seven games in each of their first-round series — beating Montreal in 2011, losing to Washington in 2012 and knocking out Toronto last season. If it wasn’t for the Game 7 miracle, the Bruins would have been out in one round two years in a row.

Over those three years, that’s a cumulative record of 11-10, all against teams that the Bruins were seeded above and favored to beat.In particular, the Bruins have struggled to set a tone at the beginning of the series when they host the first two games, going a cumulative 2-4 in the last three years in Games 1-2.

Yet in the second and third rounds — theoretically against better teams and in more important series — the Bruins are 12-4 in the last three postseasons. They’ve advanced to the Stanley Cup Final in both years they’ve survived the opening series.

The Bruins open this year’s first round Friday against the Red Wings, a team that’s fully capable of giving the Bruins headaches if the Presidents’ Trophy winners aren’t ready.

“It says with the parity in the league,” Patrice Bergeron said. “It's good to have that tough matchups, but we need to make sure we have a good start and we need to get out of the gates faster. The Red Wings are a tough opponent.”

Bruins coach Claude Julien was asked his opinion for why the Bruins have had slow playoff starts. He cited two main reasons:

- There are many upsets in the Stanley Cup playoffs. Julien said that 40 percent of underdogs win in the first round and “that’s a pretty high number … so it’s not just us.”

Hockey is more inclined to upsets than pro basketball or football. Like this year, the Bruins have been a high seed and have a target on their backs.

“It just means that when you get into the playoffs, you’ve got sometimes one of the top teams playing against a team that has nothing to lose,” Julien said. “It just goes to show you what pressure does versus, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain — let’s just go out there and play.”

- In previous years, the Bruins have cruised to the finish line and lost the intensity they’d built up.

In 2011, the Bruins clinched the Northeast Division with four games still left. They allowed five goals the next day to the Rangers, just the second time in nearly two months that happened.

The next year, Julien’s club was locked into the No. 2 seed with a week left and left several players at home for the final road trip of the season.

At the end of the lockout season, the Bruins were a mess most of the season and dropped the last two games to blow the division title.

This year will be a test. The Bruins’ intensity dipped a bit down the stretch after clinching the conference title early. They were not as good in April as their razor-sharp March.

“One of the things that I said to our team is that when we’ve clinched, we’ve kind of put our guard down a little bit in the last few games,” Julien said. “So we’ve kind of, instead of going into the playoffs on a high note, we’ve had to limp our way through the first round a little bit and it’s taken us some time to find our game. Look at the Montreal series [in 2011] — we had lost the first two games at home before we went back there.”

In the last week of the regular season, Julien got on his team after a lackluster shootout loss at Winnipeg, saying he was disappointed in the players. He pushed the buttons to keep the intensity high a little longer, both to clinch the Presidents’ Trophy as well as just for the sake of staying intense. The Bruins responded with a solid win over the Sabres before pulling back the reins for the New Jersey finale.

“I think this year, we just kept our team going and going,” Julien said. “Whether that Presidents’ Trophy was something that kept us going, I think it was important for us to keep playing fairly well, and just because we had a couple of iffy games there at the end in Minnesota, Winnipeg, doesn’t mean we feel like we’re limping into the playoffs, or maybe not going at full tilt and let our guard down.

“I think this year, we’ve played pretty consistent and we hope that that’s going to be helpful for us there in that first round.”